Deposition

Interestingly, the verb “depose” today is used to mean both “to give a deposition under oath” and “to examine a witness under oath in preparation for a trial” (“A technology firm suing Apple Inc. for patent infringement cannot depose co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs because it failed to show it had exhausted less burdensome means to obtain the information…” Westlaw, 5/23/11). Of course “depose” also means “to throw out of power,” so context is everything in its use. I suspect that it wouldn’t be hard to find a few corporate CEOs who had been forcibly “deposed” because their underlings spilled the beans when they were “deposed.”

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